Queer Film in East Asia

With regard to film and video work from within the
East Asian region itself, I would not deny that in constructing same-sex sexual
activity as the basis of an identity or subject position rather than only
a particular behaviour, there is a borrowing from the constructions we term
'lesbian', 'gay', and now 'queer', that did originate in the West. However,
there is no difference between this borrowing from the West and the postcolonial,
resistant mimicry engaged in by the forebears of those very nationalist and
now regionalist elites who are attempting to invoke Confucianism in a post
hoc effort to construct themselves as authentic and essentially local.

Furthermore, although the position of conscious agency
that we term 'lesbian', 'gay', or 'queer' is signified heavily in many of
these films and videos, they reconstitute it in relation to local specificities.
Just as work on the intersection of sexuality and race and/or ethnicity has
moved away from identity and toward coalition in the postmodern plurality
of late-capitalist America, this work places queer theory and queer practice
in an international frame. This frame may be globalized, but not in the sense
of a homogenization (or identity) but more in the sense of a linking across
differences (or coalition).

For example, although Chen Kaige's Farewell
to My Concubine is homophobic in my estimation, homosexuality is not
constructed as alien but at least partly as the product of the training in
the Beijing opera school where one of the boys is trained in a female role
from the start. Given Ellen Pau's engagement with the intersection of lesbianism,
Cantonese all-female opera, and cross-dressing in Song of the Goddess
and the same setting used in The Silent Thrush, this is emerging
as a privileged Chinese site or trope in the discursive construction of homosexuality.

The three fake wedding films, Okoge and
Twinkle from Japan and The Wedding Banquet from
Taiwan, all engage gay identity in relation to the Confucian family tradition,
with its concern for carrying on the line. The Asian family and the construction
of the individual as 'relational self' has been the subject of much writing
and study over the years. However, what is important here is that these are
unlike Western discursive constructions of lesbian and gay identity. The latter
tend to oppose the blood family and gay identity, as signified in the phrase
'coming out', so that 'out gay' figures in films very frequently have tended
to be without blood family or excluded from participation in that family.
In the three fake wedding films, however, the possibility of a satisfactory
life outside the family is not even considered; instead, the problem is how
to reconcile gay identity with a position inside the Confucian family.

All these instances are further evidence of how the
deviationist position constitutes not a Western incursion into a pure Asian
frame, but rather a selective borrowing from outside that further hybridizes
an already hybridized space.

Chris Berry lectures in Cinema Studies at La Trobe
University. This piece is extracted with permission from his latest book A
Bit on the Side, (EM Press).